


Prism

by kiki_miserychic



Category: The OC
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, post season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 05:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiki_miserychic/pseuds/kiki_miserychic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 short instances through the course of Summer’s summer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prism

Fingers tracing over her spine, raising goose bumps in their wake. Summer thought about how cliché the whole thing was. She flips over to her other side in the bed, to face Seth in all his wacky haired glory.

“Do you love me?” Isn’t that the million dollar question or in Newport, the multi-billion dollar question.

“Duh, of course I do.” Seth answers without having to think about it, getting out of bed to look around for his outrageous t-shirt and outdated jeans. The sex is over, leaving Summer to wondering why he stuck around for a whole seventeen minutes of afterglow, despite his previous comment.

“You doing anything tomorrow, Cohen?” A simple question posed with a light-hearted and unthreatening tone, something Summer had perfected the moment she entered the world.

“Going sailing with Ryan.” Seth explains, stomping on his second Converse shoe.

“Ok,” her hands on the pillow became very interesting to Summer. It was strange how her Urban Decay Burnout nail polish was supposed to be a golden pink, but just looked orange.

~//~

Standing outside of her beach front home, Summer Roberts digs through the contents of her purse. The large container holds lip gloss, SPF 45 sun block from the up scale drugstore, a Tampax Pearl for an emergency, and a camera phone at first glance. On the second run through, Summer uncovers her MAC pressed powder, Urban Decay XXX Shine Gloss in the shade of a blue glitter named Disco Inferno, pocket size tissues, Extra sugar free gum, monogrammed leather Louis Vuitton wallet to go with the purse, and photo booth pictures that she would forget. More towards the bottom she sees spare change, a mirror compact in the shape of a little pink heart, and a rebel piece of red gumball. All that and her keys were the last to be found at the bottom, next to her contact solution.

“Where were you?” The dreadful woman Summer is forced to call her stepmother is standing in the middle of the kitchen looking out onto the beach, daring to question where Summer was at four in the morning during vacation.

“None of your business.” Summer opens the massive, cold steel refrigerator doors to pull out a cup of low fat yogurt.

“Do you really think those boys of yours will come back to you once they realize what you are?” The disgust in her voice clearly evident with no attempt to conceal it.

“You would know from experience I’m told.” Summer drags out a blue bottle of water. She got them because she’d heard that the molecules of the water were created in a lab to be smaller. In some scientific and nerdy way, that meant they could be absorbed better. Summer liked the look of the bottle.

“Who was it this time?” Her stepmother always asks the five w’s. Sometimes Summer answers a few of her questions. Other times she ignores her completely.

“He used to live here, but his father was outed, so they moved. He came back for a bit, but all his so called friends were gone, except for me.” Summer said thoughtfully. This was one of those times when she felt like going over her conquests of sorts.

“Never the first choice are you?” Came the biting response from the unmoving statue.

“I was, once, and I will be again. Just wait. It won’t be long.” Summer flashes a cruel smile, using all her teeth possible.

“Your father will be home sometime this week.” Not casting an eye in the direction of her stepdaughter, while wearing an oversized terry cloth robe with nothing underneath except for hundred of thousands of dollars in plastic surgery. Now that Summer thinks about it she realizes the robe belongs to her father. She thinks even more and places the yogurt back inside the door of the fridge and closes it.

“I know.” Summer declares, ending the longest conversation she has held for three weeks and leaves the room as soon as she entered it.

~//~

“Hello?” Voice at the end of the telephone.

“Hi.” Short response. Summer was the one who called, she knew that she should be the one to begin the conversation, but at the moment she didn’t care.

“Hi.” The female voice got softer from the experience of previous calls like these.

“How’s it going Anna?” Summer slips back into a normal conversation that she never started.

“It’s going good. We’ve started school already here and so far...” Anna continued, but they both knew that Summer wasn’t listening. They also knew that it had nothing to do with being rude.

“Watched anything on tv lately?” Stupid question asked after a few seconds of silence from the other line.

“Not really, but there was this one...” Stupid answer that isn’t noticed.

“What’s so different between Philadelphia and here?” Summer can hear the hushed sounds of toe nail painting through the way Anna’s voice comes through the phone. It was almost like her neck was broken at an odd angle and the noises came through the lines and into her ears skewed. 

“The weather mostly. That and the people. Everyone acts...” Anna talks and Summer chews at her the edges of her mouth. Bad habit that she knows she should quit. She was able to stop once, when she was younger. It had worked then, but obviously not too well with the practice resurfacing. She can taste the tang of her Ink Lip Stain and tries to remember it’s a shade and not a flavor.

“Oh, is it easy to leave here?” Summer doesn’t want Anna’s answer, but this one she attempts to let sink it.

“Yes, but only because I was there for so short a time. If I had been born there...” That’s all of Anna’s answer that she can absorb.

“It’s hard to forget that Orange County is only a small part of the world.” This is the first interruption Summer’s made in one of their conversations since the first few.

“Yeah, Summer, I guess it can feel like the only important things happen in Newport.” Anna replies, leaving silence on both ends.

“Ok, talk to you later.” Summer’s cheerful voice returns and she closes her cell phone before Anna responds.

~//~

Stupid Summer sat in her stupid car a little ways down the stupid street where the stupid idiot was working on a stupid construction job. Summer wasn’t upset. Nope, she is expanding her stupid vocabulary. She knows it’s petty to sit here and wish for an accident to happen. She realizes it’s wrong because he has a girl at home with a baby on the way. She also knows that she’s being selfish because it’s wrong to wish something bad on someone who did nothing to deserve it, but he’s still stupid.

There’s a knock on her windshield that nearly makes her spill her Starbuck’s latte. She’s spent the last ten minutes trying to catch the hint of green in her Pipe Dream Nail Enamel in the UV blocked rays of the sun coming through the windshield. Not paying attention meant that she had not seen the stupid idiot walk to her stupid door.

“Hey.” He says once she rolls her window down and turns off the music.

“Yeah, hey.” Summer knows she’s the stupid one now. No real excuse for this one, so she decides to act like she’s not doing anything and he’s the one doing something weird.

“What are you doing here?” He asks, glancing back to the construction area. Summer looks as well and notices that everyone must be on their lunch break.

“Taking you to lunch. Get in.” Summer commands and does not expect resistance.

“No.”  
“Pardon me?” Her hand freezes with the engine halfway turned over.

“I can’t.” A simple reason would have been enough, but he doesn’t even offer a lame one. No explanation or wasted words. God forbid.

“Fine. I was trying to be nice, Chino.” Summer wants to turn the whole thing back on him again, but she has a sneaking feeling that it won’t work.

“Thanks, but this is my life now.” He looks down at the pavement, refusing to acknowledge anything connected to Summer.

“That’s not what this is about.” Summer forgets the stupid cover because it wasn’t going to work anyways and she’s here, so she might as well get some answers for once.

“I know.” He knows everything apparently, except what’s good for him.

“Fine, see ya around.” Summer gives up and lies as she punches the button to put the window back up. She peels out of the parking place and doesn’t wait to see where the stupid idiot goes. It’s not like she cares or anything like that.

~//~

“It’s Vanilla Coke, Sum, I swear.” Marissa tries to convince her that the drink doesn’t smell like alcohol.

“Whatever, Coop, it’s your stomach pump.” Summer’s tired of trying to keep her friend sober over the summer when all she wants to do is curl up with a nice cosmopolitan and watch Good Day Live. There’s nothing like alcohol before noon on a weekday.

“Don’t be so dramatic.” Marissa goes back to reading her magazine at the vanity and sipping what everyone thinks is just a glass of pop. Summer watches her from the bed and can almost make herself believe that it is only pop because it’s in a tall glass and alcohol is never in anything but tumblers and odd shaped glasses. Anymore she’s too worn out to make herself believe in lies too.

“Fine.” She’s being using that word a lot. Rolling over to reach her purse, she pulls out her Buzzkill Lip Gunk and reapplies without a mirror. Her skills obvious when she still manages to get every stroke flawlessly in place.

“I’m bored.” Marissa announces like the whole world is supposed to care.

“Me too. Got anymore Vanilla Coke?” Summer looks directly into Marissa’s already glossy doll eyes and makes her mouth form a smile around her picket white fence teeth.

~//~

It’s six in the morning and Summer can hear the horrible sounds of an early morning infomercial selling blenders. The architect who designed this house obviously had no sense about the nature of sound.

Summer requires perfect silence to sleep. It’s not that noises keep her up, it’s more like they give her an excuse to think. These are things that she wants to keep wrapped up and buried deep within herself. It’s a proven fact that if coal is kept in a deep, dark, small place under pressure for a long time, it will turn into a diamond. So she keeps that in the back of her mind at all times; the possibility of transforming into a diamond.

She's thought about everything that has happened. Ryan leaving to go back to Chino, which might as well be a world away. All for a baby that might not be his. In a way Summer admires him for taking a step out of his life to make someone else’s better, but only for a second.

Thus causing Seth to leave to what could be an actual world away. Most people make new friends when old ones move away, but of course, her boy had to freak out and run away. The least he could have done was run in the right direction.

Marissa was put back into an institution after being found in a pool of her own vomit. When Summer heard what happened to Coop, the smallest part of her laughed at the fact that Julie didn’t find her, it was Caitlin. Even then it was at least a day after she’d starting binge drinking and hours after she began puking. There is such a thing as a house that’s too big. Most people thought that Marissa tried to kill herself by drinking, but Summer thought that was bullshit. They lived in California, if Coop wanted to drown herself why not do it out in the ocean where she was sure to succeed?

The Cohens collapsed in on each other. Sandy and Kirsten couldn’t deal well with losing one son, let alone two.

Mr. Nichol realized that there was no male to pass down his legacy to, so he demanded a search for his grandson, saying that Seth must have been kidnaped. Everyone knew it was useless to look for a teenage boy who didn’t want to be found, but money talks and it says a lot.

Summer submerges herself deeper into the covers of her bed, smearing her Heavy Metal Glitter Liner even more than it had from the night. The white Pyrotechnics makeup made her eyes look even darker than usual. 

It may be warm outside her room, but she feels cold despite it. She idly thinks about raging around the room, crashing random glass objects into the walls, ripping apart stuffed animals, and throwing the sheets off her bed, but she knows people only did that in movies. She decides to close her eyes instead, wraps all her thoughts and emotions until they intertwined together, pushes them down, and thinks of nothing but the way light is reflected on the surface of a diamond.

~//~


End file.
